me, sony and leftfield.co.uk

i’ve told this many times but haven’t actually written it down – so here it is – another chapter in the history of mr l k and his lifelong pursuit of pissing off his employers….. (ps i did a cursory spell check – this is typed as a stream of conciousness and only a minimal edit where i added double words etc)
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as ive stated before i used to work for sony music europe – we were in charge (unsurprisingly) of all the sony offices around europe but we were situated on the top 2 floors at gt marlborough st opposite carnaby st in the west end that sony uk were based in. (a 24 hour building, brilliant cafe, tons of fun – most of the time)

at the time though i was getting heavily into the net and was basically the only person in the building who had any idea of the “world wide web”. one of the vp’s had been made redundant and a pc suddenly turned up that was hooked up to the internet via a dial-up script and 18.8k modem along with a pathetic 20 page “manual” about the internet. how it came about i’ll never know but it was sat at this empty desk doing sod all and i soon spent most of my time on it at lunchtimes and for hours after work. no-one had a clue what was gong on. (at the same time they also put a similar pc in columbia’s press dept office on the 5th floor and to this day i dont think anyone in there ever touched it while i was there)

after about a month or so i had engineered the pc to be opposite my desk – and was on the net every second i could possibly be

this was 1995

sony’s IT dept on the ground floor would ask me (asst to the vp of finance) about the net, i started playing with the lotus notes system we had and creating custom-built designed lotus notes email templates, anyone who had a leaving do i would create a custom designed email to send around the building etc – i’d get asked about pc problems, software shit etc – nothing whatsoever to do with my actual job

sony u.s. (who were our bosses) created a “new media” division with one german who had obviously been brought over from the german co. because he was the only tech savvy there and had sold it to them.

thanks to a friend kosso, i gave them the idea of covering bands for the new sony europe website – ie, use a sony dat recorder to interview the artist before the gig, take photos and record some audio and do a review that could get put up on their website for the next day – “great idea – could you do it?” – er – pfffh – yeah i think so… dur…. of course i can, why i suggested it you divs – i get to go to gigs, get a photo pass, do the after show etc and i get my mate to do the interview and do the review – double win…

i did this for about 4 months and then they advertised a job as his assistant and webmaster for a the website

i had so many phone calls when the job was advertised it was silly – it had my name written all over – i obviously applied

i didnt get an informal interview – i resigned – it wasnt accepted

oh well – idiots – whatever. i continued to spend all my time on the net and at the time really got into leftfield (columbia records) and noticed that the domain leftfield.co.uk was available and that this “new media” division (who were doing the sony europe website) hadnt registered it. i suggested this to them at least half a dozen times over about a 2 month period – fuck all.

i decided that rather than let the domain name get picked up by someone else and squat it (this was a time when domain squatting to make money was rife) i decided to buy it myself and then give it to sony. i told my boss and he agreed.

at the same time i was playing around with website design so i thought i’d kill two birds with one stone and come up with a neat website for leftism. i spent about 6 weeks on it and put it online on leftfield.co.uk but under a subfolder that unless you knew the url you couldnt find it – there was no linking & it had a robot.txt file so it couldnt accidentally be picked up by google etc (this is now 1997)

i then presented this to the md of columbia via his secretary who i knew

that night i got a phone call on my answer machine demanding that the website be taken down and to report to personnel immediately the following morning

i was accused of stealing Columbia’s intellectual property and god knows what else – i spent so much time trying to explain what was going on that i ended up after about 3 weeks of this crap of saying fuck it – i’d rather actually now resign than give them the pleasure of having the bloody domain name etc that i’d offered them FOR FREE

my boss and the president of sme backed me and refused to force me to give them the domain name which left the md of columbia and their personnel dept right hacked off – however my boss presented me with a cheque for the amount of the domain name saying that sony would fairly pay me for the cost of the registration – i was about to accept it when i noticed it was written on his own bank account – sorry – if i’m going to be paid for this it has to be drawn on a sony account not my boss’ personal account

so i declined the cheque and decided at the point i’d had enough as it wasnt fun anymore, the days of enjoying my job had gone, i’d seen friends being sacked so that someones friend could get their job – and it was all getting non-music

i kept the domain name and created the website for the anti-capital radio takeover of xfm on leftfield.co.uk – when i left to go to ibiza later that year i couldnt be arsed to keep the name up so i let it lapse

the nice ending was that my boss had saved the original cheque he’d written a month or so earlier and gave it to me as part of a leaving present – i had no problem cashing the cheque then – he then resigned later the same year

i could get into the conversations about mp3, the net, blah blah blah i had but i dont need to – they didnt listen to anyone – they, polygram (universal), emi and warners are paying the price for trying to ignore it – sorry, no sympathy